DeShazier: When saying "I'm sorry" isn't enough

Pau Gasol said it was supposed to be funny, or something, but not offensive when he and his teammates on Spain's Olympic basketball team posed for a newspaper ad back home in which they used their fingers to make their eyes look more Chinese.

You know, to salute the people in the host country of the Olympics.

Get it? Isn't that funny?

Or something?

Isn't it always a side-splitter to make light of a country's ethnicity? A knee-slapping good time when you insult a race and insist that people - specifically, the media, because the messenger always is viler than the message - are making a big deal out of nothing?

"We felt it was something appropriate, and that it would be interpreted as an affectionate gesture," Jose Manuel Calderon, Spain's point guard, wrote on his blog. "Without a doubt, some ... press didn't see it that way."

The fact Calderon and his teammates didn't see it that way suggests they must have had their fingers in their eyes. When Forrest Gump delighted us with the phrase, "Stupid is as stupid does," he must have been projecting forward to this team because all 15 of the players made the gesture and, of course, all 15 seem not to know what all the fuss is about. And, not to be outdone, the Spanish women's basketball team also posed for a similar photo, as well as four members of Argentina's women's Olympic soccer team.

"I'm sorry if anybody thought or took it the wrong way and thought that it was offensive," said Gasol, who plays for the NBA's Los Angeles Lakers.

No thinking necessary - it was. And it will remain that way because the ad, which only is being used in Spain, hasn't been pulled. Seur, a Spanish courier company and team sponsor that is responsible for the spot, said it didn't intend to offend and doesn't plan to withdraw the ad, which is scheduled to run on select days through the end of the Games.

"This was clearly inappropriate, but we understand the Spanish team intended no offense and has apologized, said Emmanuelle Moreau, a spokeswoman for the International Olympic Committee, in an e-mail. "The matter rests there as far as the IOC is concerned."

It shouldn't rest there, for the IOC or anyone else because, obviously, the team and its sponsors don't get it.

Whether or not offense was intended, offense was taken. Not the "someone-is-going-to-take-offense-if-you-say-the-sun-rises-in-the-East" kind of offense, where folks look to be contrary just for the sake of being contrary. Rather, this is major insult, understandable offense and a situation in need of better resolution than what has been offered. Because the fact that the ad hasn't been pulled - the fact that the thought process seems to fall along the "We're right and everyone else of wrong" fault line - says that the apology isn't at all that sincere.

In short, they're sorry - just not sorry enough for players to insist the ad be pulled, or sorry enough for the sponsor to pull it.

Calderon said the team posed in response to a request from the photographer. Since members apparently are unable to determine for themselves what might be offensive, it's a good thing the photographer didn't direct them to be more obscene.